Development
Originally announced in 2010 by German developer Firehazard Studio who has purchased the video game rights to the classic 80s animated series from rights-holders World Events Productions, the game was set to be a 3D on-rails action game for multiple current home consoles at the time. Firehazard looked to the fan community for financial support via a crowdfunding campaign on the (now defunct) German Kickstarter-like platform "pling.de" which promised soundtracks, physical copies of the game and other goodies. While the campaign was successful, the details on the development progress were minimal and Firehazard went silent.
After many years of development trouble, the game resurfaced with a final "all-or-nothing"Kickstarter campaign. If it had failed, the team would have lost the rights but the campaign ended up being successful, arriving at $96,591 out of a $75,000 goal. The game that is now being developed with this money is going to be a 2D sidescrolling shooter heavily inspired by Contra. Initially, the 3DS version started development at BPlus Games, but soon development moved to another studio. Part of the campaign's base goal were retro ports to SEGA Dreamcast and PC Engine CD/TG-16 CD. The latter were originally going to be be handled by Aetherbyte Team.
In its final pre-release stretch, the development team is officially just referred to as Team Saber Rider with PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo 3DS eShop, PC/Mac/Linux, Dreamcast, and PCEngineCD as the final release platforms. Publisher JoshProd will distribute physical copies of all versions except the 3DS release.
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